Photographer Ulric Collette explores familial similarity in his Split Face collection, released in 2011. By combining photographs of his subjects, head-on images fused at the middle in a beautiful effort of blending, Collette has created a genetics-based series of visual portmanteaus.

It’s amazing; Collette’s photos lay out every physical likeness and dissimilarity in both the small and large scale sense of appearance, and he’s almost clinical in his exploration: against a white backdrop, his subjects exist in a vacuum with no hints as to who they may be. And even so, there’s so much personality here, a split spectral sense of it in each raised eyebrow and hesitant smile. They make me imagine a colossal web of every tiny difference in personality, choice, thought and action - all manifesting outward for two very different lives lived. 

“Genetic Portraits” will be on display at Centaur Theatre’s Seagram Art Gallery in Montreal through October, and you can see more of his work here. 

- Maggie